Historically, companies treated all customers equally in most situations, regardless of their relationship with the customers. Thus, for example, when a company was receiving telephone calls from customers (e.g., for technical support or to purchase new products/services), each customer would typically wait in the same queue of callers for the next available company representative, regardless of a customer's previous value or potential future value to the company. Some companies have taken limited steps to provide better service to some customers in such situations, such as by reducing the wait time for certain customers and/or by providing certain customers with distinct telephone numbers with which to contact the company to receive differentiated service. However, such existing techniques are limited in their effectiveness (e.g., in order to provide some customers with distinct telephone numbers for contacting the company, the company must identify those customers in advance and maintain additional infrastructure to provide the different communication channels).
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide enhanced techniques for tailoring the service provided to customers or others contacting an organization based on the value to the organization of the contacting party, such as to increase customer retention and maximize net revenues to the organization.